'Tartuffe', on stage at Huntington Theatre, speaks volumes about the world today

Tuesday

Nov 7, 2017 at 11:34 AMNov 8, 2017 at 6:58 PM

By R. Scott Reedy Correspondent

Huntington Theatre Company Artistic Director Peter DuBois has long considered “Tartuffe” to be one of his favorite plays. It wasn’t until recently, however, that he decided the time had come for him to direct the classic Molière comedy.

“I’ve known the play since high school. I grew up in a strict Catholic environment in Enfield, Connecticut, but I was rebellious. I remember being struck even as a teenager by what I saw as various hypocrisies in the Church.

“Then I read this play, written 300 years earlier, that, as far as I was concerned, could have been written yesterday,” said DuBois by telephone during a recent rehearsal break.

“At first, it appealed to me as a piece about religion. Now I see it as being about the larger body politic. It’s very relevant to today. It’s also smart and very, very funny.”

DuBois’s production of “Tartuffe” – featuring a translation by Ranjit Bolt – begins performances Nov. 10 at Boston’s Huntington Avenue Theatre, one year after he decided he wanted to direct it.

“The morning after the 2016 presidential election, I woke up thinking, ‘This is the time to do this play.’ I programmed it immediately. I had been wanting to do something which would reflect my own point of view and this just fell into my lap,” explains DuBois.

The comedy was written in 1664 and first performed that year at the Palace of Versailles. In the story, the charming title character uses a combination of wile and guile to worm his way into the household of a wealthy landowner, Orgon.

Once ensconced there, Tartuffe plots to wed Orgon’s daughter, bed his wife, and ultimately leave both behind to run off with the family fortune. Evidence quickly mounts that Tartuffe is not to be trusted, but the captivated Orgon is unable to see his duplicity, continuing to view his boarder as a man of earnest holiness. With a whirling blend of religious piety and hypocrisy, Tartuffe aims to keep Orgon under his spell and his detractors at bay.

The Huntington first presented “Tartuffe” 26 years ago this month in an acclaimed production directed by Jacques Cartier which used the Standard English translation by Richard Wilbur, a two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, former U.S. Poet Laureate, and Belmont resident who died on Oct. 27 at age 96.

After thinking about doing the play in the traditional fashion, DuBois says he decided to set his production instead in the present day.

“I thought about doing it straight, but it didn’t make sense dramaturgically. We’re no longer writing plays for kings. The story is extremely relevant to our own period. There are very clear connections between the centuries and the generations.”

DuBois acknowledges that moving the action to the present day required some adjustments.

“One of the big shifts in approaching the play as if it were about today is that Tartuffe is poor and from a small village. And he feels sociopathic rage when he comes into a house of extremely wealthy people who have access to the king.

“The Tartuffe of today is more ambiguous. He is not Robin Hood, however, not at all. He wants everything for himself.”

The character may be more ambiguous, but, for DuBois, the play’s connection to the present was compelling.

“I feel the reason and time to do a classic is the moment you find it relevant to a moment in the world today,” says DuBois.

“The U.S. is a house in disarray right now. We’re repeatedly being thrown into chaos and we just don’t know the fallout of the actions being taken every day. In this play, today’s political climate gets comically refracted in a myriad of ways.

“You can read several of these characters as very much like some of today’s political figures. Our current political moment is wildly chaotic and a brilliant farce like this is a wonderful way to explore that,” according to DuBois.

To help him with that exploration, DuBois has assembled a cast led by actor and comedian Brett Gelman (Netflix’s “Stranger Things”) as Tartuffe and Tony Award winner and Lincoln native Frank Wood (“Side Man,” “August: Osage County”) as Orgon. The company also features local actors including Steven Barkhimer as Monsieur Loyal, Sarah Oakes Muirhead as Mariane, and Paula Plum as Orgon’s mother, Madame Pernelle.

“A great ‘Tartuffe’ requires actors who have facility with languages and who’ve done the classics. Synchronicity of the design elements is also critical. We’re placing this production in the present day, but I want the contemporary to slip into period and vice versa.”

With that in mind, the director chose to use Bolt’s translation, which premiered at the National Theatre in London in 2002. While many English translations of “Tartuffe” dispense with the familiar rhyming couplets, Bolt’s stays true to the way Molière wrote the French verse.

“Molière wrote 12 beats per line, and the Wilbur translation, which I love, is 10 beats. At eight beats per line, however, the Bolt translation is a faster take on the language. It gives the actors more flexibility to make choices and create more contemporary imagery.”

Now in his 10th season as the Huntington Theatre Company’s Artistic Director, DuBois, 47, has directed Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and “A Little Night Music,” as well as world premieres including Lydia R. Diamond’s “Smart People,” Gina Gionfriddo’s “Can You Forgive Her?” and Stephen Karam’s “Sons of the Prophet.”

To listen to him tell it, his current project has been worth the wait.

“I feel like I am exorcising a lifetime of Catholicism. It’s giving me an incredible sense of relief. I can see things so much more clearly now that I have some distance from my religious upbringing.

“Directing this play is an absolute joy. The challenge comes from wanting to get it right. It’s like the obligation you feel to satisfy your lover. You’re nervous because you want everything to go well, but you’re also enjoying every minute of it,” says DuBois with a laugh.